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Red River
Walter Dole didn't have much to do in the way of packing. He disassembled his hibachi and put it into the cargo container on top of his camper. He kicked the blocks out from around the tires of the camper and hooked it to the hitch on the back of his panel van. Walt had died once before. Seeing the gates to the Shadowlands had convinced him, among other things, that there was little point in owning more than he could drag on a trailer hitch. He put a hopeful few hundred dollars in an envolope at the trailer park office in expectation that he may want his lot back. If the mythical Jason Rhode or Red River didn't kill him. Planning two months in advance was the closest thing to optimism the world ever got out of Walter Dole. The glass was never more full than when Walt made a plan based upon the phrase 'if I'm still alive in two months.' Follow the Yellow brick Rhode... Which one was more mythical? Rhode? Or Red River? He knew more about Rhode. There could be (had been) books written about the guy...But there was only the barest of records at all about the place called Red River. Only those photos, and the knowledge that the place's actual location baffled everyone who should know better. He had just as good a chance at landing in Oz. Maybe he would have to find a tornado. He’d seen the photos, of a cyborg left tied to a post, stripped of identity by the elements far more efficiently than being merged with machine had ever done. A gutted skeleton. There weren't thirty bodies; Al had apparently, in Jason's absence, decided to provide some sort of humanitarian end to those men that he had captured for daring to challenge him. Which led one to wonder where they'd gone, or if they'd survived. There had been other aspects of the bones that hadn't escaped him. The long bones had been shot through with little holes, each a few millimeters across. The femurs were peppered with occlusions... and the metal parts themselves had strange extrusions, as if the solid state cybernetics had been somehow convinced to depart from their design and grow new, extraneous tongues and tendrils of matter... Could the place be found by someone who wanted to find it? They had not, at any rate, returned to the Army or the Technocratic institution that had sent them. The Traditions may have labored under the conclusion that the 'Crats posessed such knowledge and were concealing it. That was not the case. Walter Dole went to Needles and filled his gas tank with the expectation of not being able to do so again until he was retreating from this snipe hunt victorious or, most probably, otherwise. He had a short conversation with a man with poor enough eyesight not to take offense at his disfigurement. That man's name was Johnson. He used to be a farmer. He told him to lock his doors. He'd had a red Ford stolen right out from under his nose a few years back. Never did find that truck. It wasn't just trucks that went missing... Johnson was also kind enough to tell Walt that there used to be a big irrigation project, back in the 50's and '60's, aiming to turn the red desert out here green. Told him how, for a brief period, it had, and how he owned this here gas station back then, too, selling fuel, candy bars, ice, and RC cola to the thirsty farmers who had come to try their luck growing corn in sand, and while the Red River project had been up and running, they’d succeeded. There'd been about a hundred thousand acres sown and harvested for a decade or so. "You know where I can find the town of Red River, or if anything's left of it?" Walt finally asked the man point blank, when he realized that his cataracts prevented more than the man identifying the scar where his ear used to be. He didn't trust his fellow men down here not to identify him if the Authorities came to question. He kept his back to the 76 station camera. His size was enough of a giveaway. Walt's voice was a whisper for his stature. Farmer Johnson just stared through his nearly 7' tall, four hundred pound form as he spoke those words, and even though he’d not actually seen their surroundings for almost seven years, he pointed out the ghost of a gravel road that led off for that accursed place. Red River. And as Walt thanked him kindly, went back to his truck, and drove off, Johnson turned away, belly turning over with memory. “You know where I can find Red River?” Manny Parsons had come out here to Red River from the San Joaquin valley with his wife and two small kids in the spring of '59. He'd made friends with Johnson and the two couples had had a regular bridge night at the Needles VFW. Manny's house had been situated in what was then the middle of the Red River effort, and he'd built a nice house out there among the rolling fields of green corn. They had been happy out there, and his two kids had grown up almost as fast as the corn they ran and played in among the rows. Johnson remembered them... twins... a boy and a girl, like night and day. They'd shared their mommy's womb and were born only seconds apart, the boy dark haired, dark eyed... the girl a red head with cheeks full of freckles and bright Green eyes... Their momma was a red head... Pretty enough to make Johnson think about things it wasn't Christian to think about another man's wife. Turns out they'd blocked off the exit by the end of the 70's; the few remaining residents used the unpaved road to Needles to access the highways. Not that there were many people left. At that point the only thing the road was for was for those making their final exodus from the dead town. The road disappeared. Not overnight, but, in time. Nobody came down that road anymore. No need for it to exist. It withered and died like the last vestiges of the organ the artery was once attached to. Now that his own wife was dead from cancer and him gone blind from the cataracts the harsh desert sun had given him, he allowed himself sometimes still to think about Manny's wife, the way she held her cards. But he never did think about her for long, because when he did... he remembered other things. ...the summer of '62... He remembered the talk at the VFW had turned to the locusts... they'd come at the end of the growing season, when summer's scorching heat and the Red River project's water had brought forth the unexpected, hordes of six inch hoppers that had at times darkened the skies and stripped everything bare... they'd eaten the corn down to the topsoil along with the grass and trees, rendering the verdant hills into waste once more. The kids had been five then, and Manny had told him how the whole lot of them had gone to beating the things off the sides of the house and how his wife Clara had saved part of the herb garden by pulling up the plants and putting them into pots they kept in the living room of the two story farmhouse. She'd been pregnant with Manny's third by then. Them locusts had been the first hint that the Red River project was doomed to fail. The state scientists had told them that wetting the soil had enabled their eggs to hatch in greater than usual numbers, and had proscribed spraying to keep the pests down... but by the time they'd told them that, it'd been far too late, and the whole crop of '62 was a bust. The next year they thought they were prepared, with their tractors and sprayers ready with filled tanks of DDT... They sprayed every inch of the planted soil, and sure enough, the locusts didn't return... But in the fall of '63 it wasn't locusts that stopped the harvest.... It was storms. By then, Manny and Clara had taken to having more than a glass of beer during bridge. Johnson hadn't seen Clara with a flask like Manny would, but he'd smelled the whiskey on her breath more than once as she sipped her glass of Coke. She'd delivered a baby girl in August. It'd said 'Sophie Marie Parsons' on her death certificate. She took three breaths, and died. She'd been a perfectly formed little girl already crowned with a shock of red hair, and the doctors had no answers to the Parson's questions. The Parsons wouldn't let them do an autopsy... Manny had talked about it with him only after several Pabst BlueRibbons and more than a few pulls off his lacquered flask. "I jus couldn't let them cut into her..." He'd been holding her when she drew the only breaths of her life. But Reba Marsh, a nurse at the Red River Hospital who had been the one to wash her little body and dress her for the coffin they burned her in had shared a secret fact with Johnson's sister Irene. "They did an X-ray of that little girl..." She'd told Irene over coffee..."And what they found made them do it anyways." "That little girl had autopsy scars..." Red River Hospital was a teaching hospital. It wasn't big, but it was the biggest within two hundred miles, and during the 40's, when the Red River project began and they were laying the irrigation groundwork, diverting water from the Blue River to the north and bringing it 100 miles in the direction of Sierra Vista... It supplied Red River, Three Way, Mule Creek, and Spur Cross with doctors and nurses for their hospitals and clinics. Irene and Johnson agreed to one another that they'd never breathe a word to Manny and Clara about what Reba told her next. "They opened up that little girl and found another baby inside her." "It only had one bloodshot eye and what looked like fingers or horns sticking out of the middle of its face...it only had one arm and a sort of flipper like lower body, and it had grown up into her chest and crushed one of her lungs... and Virginia told me that when they'd looked at her little heart, that it had hold of it...that it had literally squeezed the life out of that poor little baby." In the winter of '63, Clara stopped coming to the VFW, although Manny spent more and more time there. "Has to take care of the kids..." He'd mutter when asked after her. "I don't think the water's right, Johnny." He'd said one night... Johnny had tried to get him to play cards with him, but Manny wouldn't bite. He'd just sat there with a Camel burning down to the filter as he stared at the TV in the rec room that they'd turned the volume down. Johnny had managed to bring in enough harvest that year between the storms to break even, but he knew that in light of the extra burden that his wife and two kids put on his means, Manny was being hounded by more than just dreams of his dying daughter... '62 had been a total bust, and Manny had had to go further into debt with the spraying he had to do, so now that the hail and winds and cold rain had taken their toll on Manny's land a second time, there were phone calls coming at dinner time and Manny was feeling the pressure of his creditors. "Manny, what do you mean?" "The water in my well..." The Arizona Department of Water Resources had sank wells for anyone who'd wanted to try their hand at farming back in '44. "It got into it, and must've rot there." His voice had been dreamy, as if he were lost in thought through the haze of the homebrew... "What got in it?" "The meat, Johnny." "You mean something got in there and drowned?" Manny shook his head emphatically. The clock on wall struck eleven pm... the news was showing footage from the Birmingham, Alabama race riots that had happened a couple months previous... The rec room was empty except for the two of them. Manny set the spent cigarette in the ashtray and lit another, finishing off the last of his Pabst before he began to speak. Johnny noticed his hands were shaking. "No. No." "Well... how did it get in there?" "It fell out of the sky." He was staring at the silent images on the TV screen, a commercial for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese... Johnny followed his gaze, but finding no connection there, he looked back at his friend as he pulled a deep lungful off the cigarette smoke... "Happened in February... February third...and then again on the seventh, and once more on the twenty third." "Was cold and dry, hadn't been rain since November...just clouds... and on the morning of the third they was like blood, Johnny." "Red clouds without any wind on the ground...Clara called me out to have a look... she was... she was just starting to show with Sophie then... and we watched it happen the first time." "At first, we thought it was hailin..." "Because there was rain that started up, and then we heard things hitting the shingles..." "And when we looked over to the roof, that's when I noticed the blood." "That was what the rain was, Johnny... it was spattering Clara's apron..." "Just red as red could be... and evil smelling." "It started out light, and then came in buckets, and me and her come in off the step and stood on the porch and watched it run out of the gutters... and it was red." Johnny could only stare at him. He had no reason whatsoever to believe that Manny was lying to him. He'd only begun to drink heavily after Sophie's death... "The banging on the roof was awful, and we looked out into the yard to see what could be making it...sounded like stones... but it wasn't. It wasn't." "It was hunks of meat, Johnny." "They fell in a swatch more than four acres across and maybe ten long... took about five minutes from start to finish...and when it all let up, it looked like the inside of a slaughterhouse." "Pieces of meat, with skin on... some of it looked like hog meat... some of it looked like beef... and some of it... God Almight, Johnny I don't know how to say it, but it looked like it was human skin on some of it, even with the hairs." Walter Dole drove what was left of the Needles access road. Twice he had to stop to dig himself out of small channels. Once more he had to stop to replace a tire that had been gutted by an outcrop of rocks. He got the van rolling again, but it had begun to make a clattering sound that seemed to indicate the axle has warped slightly. It wasn't enough to stop the heavy paneled monstrosity from Walter Dole rolling forward. It did kill his air conditioning. Manny had told him how he had picked up what he could to get the yard clear of the stuff, so that the kids didn't get into it. Manny had raised his voice to his wife that day, because she'd wanted to come out and help him with the horrifying task. The meat was steaming hot in the cold air, and it stayed hot for hours after it fell. He'd never spoken harsh to her in all their ten years of marriage, but he did that day, telling her to keep the hell in the house... to keep the kids, he'd said, without talking about how he feared that contact with the stuff would be harmful to their unborn child. He'd collected four wheelbarrows of fallen flesh, and when it was stacked onto itself, the heat increased to the point of where it started to sizzle and pop, just like it was frying in the pan. He'd dumped the entire sick mess into the burn barrel as much as he could, and when he splashed gasoline across it, the accelerant started all by itself and the flames roared high and terrible, Red like no fire he'd ever seen. The smell had driven the whole family to his parents, who lived in Barstow.